AUTUMN ANGEL '69

Autumn 1969

I am lying on my back in bed in my dormitory room. Suddenly a figure appears at a distance above me and begins descending. By her huge wings I can tell she is an angel, then, as she continues to drop I am able to make out more details. She is painfully thin, incongruously large, heavy breasts pulling the flesh tight over her sternum and ribs. She appears to be bald, though simultaneously I have the impression her fiery halo is her hair and vice versa. She descends until she is ten feet or so above me where she hovers. Wind from her slowly beating wings plays across me while causing her diaphanous, green gown to billow and swirl. Her gaze is unwavering, her expression cold, almost critical. I wonder if she might be the Angel of Death, but I am not frightened. Rather I am thrilled by the immediacy and detail of the vision.

I had this dream when I was in college 34 years ago and though it would be many years before I began paying serious attention to my dreams this one has remained vivid and compelling.

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#2283 THE CRUEL FATE OF BOYS IN ROMANIA

08/04/03

I am watching a film about adolescent boys in Romania. It seems that by convention upon reaching puberty they are put to work cleaning the exterior of tall buildings. To do this they must scale the buildings, carrying their cleaning tools, without any ropes or ladders. I am uncomfortable watching these thin, ragged children clinging to the sides of grimy skyscrapers. From above, as if from a higher story in a nearby building, the camera lingers on one boy. He is lying on his stomach on an inclined, concrete surface, parallel to its top edge. The concrete is rough with lichen and almost black with soot. The camera pans back and I see that the incline is just the top of a much taller wall which is part of a huge parking deck. The boy rolls onto his back, then looses his grip and continues to roll down the incline. The camera does not flinch as he rolls off the wall and I watch with horror as he falls. The parking deck is so tall he is merely a speck by the time he hits the ground, but still I am aware, with a wave of nausea , that he bounces on impact. I am in what I understand to be my workplace, talking to several of my co-workers who have also see this film. We agree that we must persuade the hospital where we work not to adopt Romania's customs. As I rerun the film in my mind's eye I have the impression something is odd about it. Finally I perceive that throughout his fall the boy continues his lateral spin, his body remaining parallel to the ground, whereas I should expect, given the distance he falls, that at some point he would have begun tumbling head-over-heels.

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#2296 "ONCE YER UP 'EM YER DON'T WANT TO COME BACK DOWN"

09/03/03

I am a tall, slender, young man. I am climbing a steep, narrow staircase, followed by a woman with curly, blonde hair. I know she is my wife, that we have come to this Victorian building to engage in some kind of sexual dalliance. Movies are in some way associated both with the building and the experience. When we finally get to the top of the stairs we choose the door immediately to our right. The room we find is tiny— the double bed literally filling it wall-to-wall. The walls are covered with vertically striped, burgundy and silvery-white paper. We climb into the room and onto the bed where my wife shoves me from behind and tells me to lie down. I lie on my stomach while she runs her fingernails along my bare back as she recites a long poem concerned with cats and their ways of intercourse. At the end of the poem we repeat the whole pushing and scratching episode. The bed sheets pull out from a corner of the bed during this exercise. I crawl on my hands and knees to the foot of the bed and tuck the sheets back in, thinking as I do so that the next people who come to see "The Reverend", a movie which will soon be playing in association with this house, would be surprised if they were to find out what went on here. As I crawl back to the head of the bed my wife says, "Whoever comes to see "The Reverend" is in for a surprise!" I gape at her and try, stammering with amazement, to explain what just happened. Outside the room we hear a man's voice say, "These are what I call stairs!" To which a woman with a heavy Cockney accent replies, "Once yer up 'em, yer don't want to come back down!" 

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#771 SPANK THE MASTER

03/08/99

I see a Victorian school room, the students (all boys) sitting on wooden benches with slates to write on. The school master, a fat man with pince nez glasses, knee britches and a waistcoat, stands before them. He is praising them. Then he commands them to stand and take their clothes off. He too starts stripping. He tells them that as a reward for their excellence he will let them spank him, then he will spank them. I wake up uncomfortable and reluctant to write notes for this dream.


I feel a distressing dream is a demand for attention, so I went to work on this one. A word search (I keep my journal on disc) for "master" turned up "Bat Masterson" in an earlier dream. Master/Son leapt out at me and, given my background, this could only refer to Jesus. That combined with the idea of spanking reminded me of the attached picture, which I had made over a year earlier. Though originally inspired by people's tendency to see sacred images in profoundly banal settings (the Virgin's face in the oxidation on a bank window, for example) when combined with Spank the Master, it conveys a grim awareness of the sadomasochistic, essentially abusive nature of my protestant fundamentalist upbringing. 

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Hugh's digital collages are created with Photoshop LE.